Hi, I’ve got my instance (the one I’m posting from) running a couple days ago. Everything seems to work, but I notice that the little content I have on my instance can only very rarely be found from other instances. I installed lemmy with the ansible method, but is there something I should still look at myself? Thanks.

  • Salamander@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Hi! I’ve checked and federation with your instance appears to be working properly.

    For content from another instance to fetched, a person in your instance has to be subscribed to the community in which it is posted in the other instance. As an admin I try to browse other instances and subscribe liberally so that I can pull content into mine.

    Likewise, for your content to be fetched to another instance, you need a user from that instance to be subscribed to the community in your instance.

    If you search for a specific post, the content of that post will be pulled into the instance from which it is searched, but you need a subscriber to pull new posts.

    I hope that makes sense.

    • Skelectus@suppo.fiOP
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      1 year ago

      Thanks. More specifically it seems that searching for my posts in another instances search fails every time if it somehow isn’t already there.

        • Skelectus@suppo.fiOP
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          1 year ago

          Well I guess this explains it then. Thanks! Maybe it would be good idea to mention this in the troubleshooting page too

      • Salamander@mander.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I can’t tell you why this happens, but I can tell you that if you search - click somewhere to go to another page - and then search again for the same url, then the post should appear. I think that the first search will fetch the post but not display it, and the second search it will display it.

    • bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com
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      1 year ago

      I’ve made a second account on my server that is just a dummy account which subscribes to everything I can find.

      Actually thinking of maybe writing a script to check popular instances for new communities daily and having it automatically subscribe.

  • QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    This very question was answered here https://lemmy.ml/post/53911

    As @nutomic@lemmy.ml said:

    It will fetch the first 20 posts when the community is first searched from your instance (but no votes, comments etc). Once any local user subscribes to the community, all new posts/comments/votes etc will be delivered to your instance. Old items will only be fetched on demand (eg if you search them, or if they are referenced by a new item).

  • derek@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    I’ve made my own instance, but gave up keeping it, because it fetched like half of the comments from other instances and federated only half of mine.

    And also I don’t think my single-user instance had positive impact on popular instances load. Data fetching is still happened.

    • Barbarian@lemmy.reckless.dev
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      1 year ago

      It still helps a lot because most of the load is coming from serving up the feed. Just federating the data to another server is much lighter than serving up everything via the instance’s website.

      • derek@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Thanks for clarification, glad I’ve kept configs, just stopped it. Can’t say yet if I like lemmy and will stay, but I hope that’ll turn up to something great soon, so that instance will run again.

  • Lodion 🇦🇺@lemmy.click
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    1 year ago

    Content for communities you’ve created on your instance will only be visible on other instances if a user there has subscribed to the community.

    Or do you mean yours posts to communities homed to other instances do not show up?

  • sexy_peach@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Federation for Lemmy and mastodon works on a need to know basis. Otherwise even the smallest server never used would have to download all content immediately all the time.

    What this means is that a community will only show and receive posts if someone from your server joins it.

    Right now it’s still okay to join every community that you see (I do that), but with increasing traffic that won’t be useful.

    If a community isn’t shown on a server, you can always search on the server for https://serverThatTheCommunityIsOn.domain/c/community and the server will check if that address has a community.